


Exordium and Terminus

by propergoffic



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: (sorry Discord your injoke is too good not to steal), (tastefully done), Blood and Gore, Body Modification, Canon-Typical Violence, Content Warning: Ianthe Tridentarius, Corona has the depression, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, F/F, Harrow the Ninth Spoilers (Locked Tomb Trilogy), Intrigue, Is this a kissing book?, It is now, John is a Bit Not Good, Murder, Necromancy, POV Alternating, POV First Person, Religious Guilt, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Self-Harm, Sister-Sister Relationship, gideon is permadead in this one because i'm a bastard man, post-mortem Griddlehark because i am weak
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-07
Updated: 2020-10-17
Packaged: 2021-03-08 04:47:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 11,852
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26879941
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/propergoffic/pseuds/propergoffic
Summary: She never could have satisfied you, though, Harrow. She was a simple creature. You were to her like a pearl before a swine, precious beyond her comprehension. Be thankful this way opened you to me, and that when you are ready to ascend to my side, the galaxy will fall at our feet.Eight were called to Canaan House. Two survived. They have done something terrible and sacred. They have become something terrible and sacred. They are just going to have to deal with it.Remix/mash-up of Magichorse's excellent Harrow/Ianthe (I'm still holding out for 'Harrianthe') works, because they were kind enough to indulge me.
Relationships: Harrowhark Nonagesimus/Ianthe Tridentarius
Comments: 36
Kudos: 40





	1. if woman can survive, they may find -

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Calm, Heralding Chaos](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26472169) by [Magichorse](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Magichorse/pseuds/Magichorse). 
  * Inspired by [I Pray it Sleeps](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26111767) by [Magichorse](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Magichorse/pseuds/Magichorse). 



> Titles from ‘In The Year 2525’ by Zager and Evans, and a cookie if you catch all the other lyric drops.
> 
> Basically it’s a glimpse or seven into the swashbuckling full-necro space opera the Harrow cover suggests, or at least that's going on in the background of these character moments (because if there’s one thing my previous efforts at longfic have taught me it’s that I ain’t a novelist and I ain't doing the whole thing).
> 
> Griddlehark comrades, I am truly sorry. You are on the right side of history, and I will not see you in the hell that is surely prepared for me.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ianthe is on a mission from God. She will not pretend to be happy about it, but like all things, it can be turned to her advantage.

“On the first day, Harrowhawk the First stood before her God and asked if what has been done can be undone, and God said no. On the second day, Harrowhawk the First stood before Mercymorn the First and asked to be destroyed, and Mercymorn said no. And on the third day, God came to Ianthe the First and said ‘go now, and come upon my youngest daughter like a vision of loveliness, and ask of her — why is she such an insufferable mope?’ It’s hardly an inspiring gospel for the Second Myriad, is it?”

Silence. No more than I expected. Your door remained as silent as the proverbial Tomb, and I began to wonder if you’d taken matters into your own hands, attempted self-destruction. If you were lying there with your own skeletons tearing into your flesh as fast as you could regrow it, a stasis of dynamic non-annihilation that would both punish you for a sin you imagine you’d committed and ensure you never had to do anything to make good.

And while the thought of you being rent limb from limb, tendon from muscle, fibre from fibre, lying there tormenting yourself in viscera until the end of days or the next myriad was extremely attractive, I was quite genuinely on a mission from God, even if I’d paraphrased the details a tad. And you really had just stood there while the Second Saint pounded on you for an entire day: the first time Mercymorn spoke to me was to complain about your inadequacies, and that is not how I prefer to be introduced to my older (infinitely older) siblings. Bad enough that she’s a total bitch without her bitching me out too.

“You don’t have to come out. Just give me a sign. Something I can take back to Him so He doesn’t feel this entire voyage was a curse.”

Silence.

“Look. Nonagesimus. I am also not having a good time, and if you’re not going to help yourself, can you at least…”

You opened the door, and Harry — I shan’t mince words — you looked rough. Well. No. You looked like a hole in space, a walking thanergetic cascade, five feet of entropy shuffling around in shabby vestments and yesterday’s paint. But the skin of you, the surface of you, what I could see with perfectly ordinary eyes, looked like you hadn’t slept for days and had been coasting off your own thalergy instead of eating and engaging with society like a functional being.

None of which was new, but at least it confirmed to me that you were still yourself. And that you still had your sense of timing, because you’d saved me from having to make a deeply awkward and personal admission out here in the corridor where anyone could pass by and hear it.

“Tridentarius.”

You blinked at me, and the dazzling gold flecks in your eyes blanked out. Not an improvement. I had envied you those eyes from the very beginning — beyond aesthetically, of course. What they represent is something more beautiful than the shell of you could ever be; something to which I aspire. Not that you'll ever hear me admit it.

“That got your attention.”

“You used my name. What do you want?”

I wanted many things. I wanted my face on the coinage of all the Houses. I wanted the downcast eyes of my enemies averted from the very ground on which I walked. I wanted, more than anything, to see my sister, to tell her this was how it had to be, that she was and always would be her own creature, that she no longer had to pretend for both of us, that she could live and love and die and I would miss her so very much more than I already did. But I wasn’t about to admit that to you, in a corridor on board the Emperor’s flagship, somewhere on the edge of Dominicus’ undying light, when we could both sense every soul on board and every construct serving them and even the hiss of the ventilators seemed to whisper secrets into infinitely purged and reanimated air.

“I want to talk to someone who isn’t ten thousand years older than me and doesn’t speak to me in code,” I said. “I want to talk to you.”

“Why now?” You were, I already knew, usually wordier than this. You must have been exhausted, to be so blunt, so crude, so ordinarily cruel. “You barely said a word to me at Canaan.“

“We both survived Canaan, idiot. And it’s about damn time we discussed how.”

“You murdered your cavalier. I — I let mine — “

Your throat pulsed. I could almost see the words sticking in it like — shall we say like bones? Would that please you? A familiar simile in this trying time? You were choking on your own confession already.

“I don’t just mean that,” I said, coming down another discursive level until I could be as blase as you apparently needed. “May I come in?”

Your suite was a mess. I would come to discover what an untidy little creature you are, how everything but the work in hand is flung to the nearest empty space and abandoned until you have need of it again (and the same is true for your friends and allies, isn’t it?). Right now, it was still mostly black on black, piles of discarded clothing and whole reams of flimsy covered in your impenetrably cramped notation. Forget your codes and ciphers and your secret doublespeak, Harry: your handwriting has always kept your misery safe from me. I could see it all from the doorway, but you still barred my way and stared. I had come to you feeling predatory, and for the first time I wondered what it might be like to be your prey.

“I want to talk about the future,” I said. “You and I — the others already call us _the babies_ , you know that? We’re in the same boat and we’re going the same way and they don’t like either of us or think we deserve to be here.”

“We don’t,” you said. And that, I can admit, is when I lost my patience with you, when I struck you with what I know as my primary hand, not the inert lump of flesh I couldn’t trust, couldn’t feel. And that, my darling, is when you started to fight back, to _want_ again. You stopped yourself, but I saw your hand fly to your earring and I saw you draw the bone as if to strike.

“The fact that we are here at all confirms that we do,” I snapped, and wiped a trace of your paint from the back of my glove across your robe, just below the clavicle, not knowing then what I know now and how fortunate it was that we were both entirely decent. “Harry,” and do you know, I think that’s the first time I ever called you that, and relished the scowl that broke your painted skeletal smile every single time, “we both wanted this going in, before we ever knew the price, and now we’ve paid it we are become something glorious, something holy. If we don’t act like it, the sacrifices mean _nothing_.”

“What did you sacrifice? You despised your cavalier — ”

"You were hardly fond of yours. Or are you going to pretend that Gideon — ”

“If you take her name in vain,” you said, “if I ever hear your lips sully it again, it will be the last word that ever passes them. I will sew your skull, and I won’t even use a needle. I’ll just knot your teeth together and fuse your jaw into a cage. Good luck breaking out of that, _meat witch_.”

I turned my back on you, then. Of course I was insulted. Of course I was threatened. Of course I wouldn’t give you a chance. Of course it wouldn’t even work, because you didn’t yet understand how much damage we could do to one another (but you would, in time, and it would be glorious). But I had what God wanted, and more. For the first time in all the years to come I had what I wanted from you. I had felt the tide of you rising, cold and dark as the waters of Canaan at my feet, inexorable and irresistible. I knew you’d find a weakness, a way to flow. Water always does. All I had to do was wait, and be just as I am.

After all, you’ve always held yourself above me.


	2. ain't gonna need your teeth / don't need your eyes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Harrow decides to punch up instead of inward, for a change. This new resolve lasts all of four minutes.

“Your form is dreadful,” Mercymorn said to me the morning after, in the cavernous emptiness of the drill room. “You hold that rapier like a plank with a nail in it, you can’t riposte for shit, and if this was a real fight I’d have killed you four times over by now.”

“If this was a real fight,” I said to her, closing my eyes and indulging the thought that this was Aiglamene, and I was home, and this dull metallic air tasted of must and incense, and I had never left Drearburh at all and I had nobody to fight forever but — 

No. I opened my eyes again. Even my fantasies could not be trusted. There could be no indulgence. No escape. The past would not forgive me, and I had an eternal penance ahead. Instead, I straightened my back and sheathed the rapier that would never in a myriad be mine, and I continued to address Mercymorn the First, in the here and now.

“If this was a real fight,” I said again, “I wouldn’t waste my time with a sword at all. I am the Reverend Daughter of the Ninth House — ”

“You are the Ninth Saint of the First House.” Mercymorn corrected me, put up her rapier, kissed the hilt, stood ready. “You are infinitely more than what you were, and God has charged me with making you realise it. To the floor, Ninth, and let's see you make an effort this time.”

I narrowed my gaze. _I will show you how the Ninth House raises hell. I_ felt it stir — memory, pain, bile, heat, my heart skip and pulse, my skin tense around my eyes, everything in me but my bones crying out for her, for the response to my call. I wished I had her swagger, her flair, her crass and unshakeable confidence — I wished I had her ridiculous sunglasses to hide the gold I’m sure had blossomed in my eyes. I wished I had all of her.

But wishing never did me any good. I had wished for one chance, and look at me now. Utterly alone, bereft, grieving, and harangued by a saint whose very name was a mockery of what I sorely needed. But I’d killed one lyctor already, and I refused to let her sister — my sister — our sister — profane that moment.

I forced my lips to curl up in something like her smile. If she was silent, I would speak for her. If she was to be gone, I would remember her. I would relive her last days as long as I lived; every moment, every word.

_We do bones, motherfucker._

Mercymorn came for me, and I threw out my arms wide, as if welcoming the deathblow. She didn’t slow down — by now, we knew that she knew exactly how not to kill me but leave me feeling like she had — and I sprang back from the blade in the same motion, even as the bones that pierced and cradled my body flew from me and scattered and rose at my will.

God help me, Gideon forgive me, but the power is _incredible_. The raw force of lyctorhood transcends anything I accomplished before. It was all child’s play, quite literally. I had seen what Cytherea the First could do and I already knew I could do better.

The first wave were just ordinary skeletons, each one unravelled from a tarsal or metatarsal or as little as a tooth. Nothing I hadn’t done before, nothing I hadn’t thrown at Gideon before we turned sixteen: the only difference was the numbers. Before, I could manage a dozen at once before I started to bleed, a score before I was exhausted. Now, I could raise sixty in a breath, and they closed the noose on Mercymorn, clambering over each other to intercept her, and in the next breath my corsage closed around the point of her rapier and held it fast, tip against my sternum, the ribs I wore over my own crawling up the blade, ivy in a decade of autumns all at once, clawing at her wrist.

She broke away, of course — she was stronger, faster, had centuries of experience — but I’d bought time for the constructs to close, and though she could shatter them with a blow, they were many, and she was one. Blade, fist, boots, Mercymorn moved through them, and as they shattered I gathered up their shards and made them whole again, clustering and shaping and hurling spears and maces and gnarled balls whole feet across and when they were as dust, sweeping the dust itself across her vision, anything that would slow her down. I saw her face once, and I’m proud to say I threw out my hand and felt my own forefingers snap and fly for her eyes.

We fought for three and a half minutes before I slipped on my own blood, and either hit my head on the floor or swooned on my way down there. I was on my knees again in a clutch of seconds, but a clutch was all it took. Mercymorn had done her work, sheathed her sword and was waiting for me to rise. I stayed on my knees. I am proud of my work, not of my own person.

There was blood spattered and patterned around her temples, and it wasn’t mine.

“Lack of imagination,” she said. “You go for bones first, every time, and eventually even some dimwit insurgent who can’t spell ‘composite skeletal structure’ will know how to break them down. Our reputations precede us. They’re the weapon we draw first, and a weapon you don’t know how to use belongs to your enemy.”

“Still hit you, though.” Because I had; I had gone down fighting. I could learn to lose, I could learn to kneel, but I could not and would not learn to lie about how and why.

She rubbed a hand across her forehead and nodded. “Not for want of trying. I didn’t say you did badly, Ninth. You’re fighting like a lyctor. A baby lyctor with awful instincts, tedious obsessions, and no sense of her limits, but at least you’re going the right way. You need variety, and you need to trust that sword arm when you — “

That’s when I realised you were watching. You were alone — presumably Augustine had let you off the leash — and you were on the gantry, looking down at me with an expression I’d never seen on your face before, wide and open. I won't say I couldn't read it: I will say I didn't like what it said. As soon as you realised I was watching, of course, you took back your control, closed in, defending yourself, armouring yourself in heavy-lidded focus. But I wasn’t watching any more. I was back on my knees, hiding my tears from you and from Mercymorn and from the entire First House and most of all myself. I had been struck with the profoundest sense of _deja vu_. The memory had risen unbidden, and for a moment I remembered standing where you stood, feeling as you must have felt then. I still don’t know why I vomited. I’m choosing to believe it was the memory, and not because I suddenly empathised with you.

You were gone by the time I’d finished. I wiped my lips against the sleeve of my robe — which didn’t improve the taste at all, but apparently I had a reputation to cultivate — and forced myself to stand without Mercymorn’s assistance.

"I am prepared, Second. To the floor.”

She punched me in the face, but that merely gave me more fragments with which to work. I remember thinking that I was wasting the blood, and that’s when I resolved to reset my nose, then hold it and talk to you again. I couldn’t surprise her with something she taught me. The First of the First was your tutor, not mine; I couldn’t stand the sight of the Third; and God was away on business.

I had one choice.


	3. arms hangin' limp at your side

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ianthe needs Harrow's help. Harrow needs Ianthe's help. Neither of them can just ask like a normal person. And God is always listening.

I had heard about your fight with Mercymorn straight away, of course. Augustine had told me over breakfast (because we eat, Harry, because we function like we’re real people). "I don’t know what you said to her, my young apprentice, but it certainly lit a fire under her arse. She damn near took Mercy’s eye out from across the room with two fingertips. I wish I’d seen it."

I had, and I told him, and I happened to mention that you threw up afterwards.

"Ah well," he’d said, and taken a delicate sip of something orange and only recycled a handful of times. "Don’t try it with me," he’d added.

I assured him I wasn’t about to snap off my own fingers just to spite him. Or you. Especially not since I had my own theory about exactly why you’d redecorated the drill room floor so enthusiastically. I’d hurled spectacularly when I’d reattached my arm, after all. You hadn’t noticed, you were a little busy being glorious and romantic and then wailing incoherently and passing out from what was either battle fatigue or sexual frustration, and it was one of the very few times I was grateful to exist beneath your exalted notice.

My theory needed confirming, and I needed your help. You, as it happens, also needed mine, but you couldn’t just ask me to explain something to you. You had to be cowardly; you had to be cruel. I’d never known you were a bully, Harry, but it explained so much about that poor whipped dog of a cavalier who’d come back to you every time you sent her away in shame and silence. You couldn’t have asked me and I wouldn’t have condescended to tell you anyway. Not without a fight.

So, bless your twisted little heart, you gave me one. You’d blood warded your rooms, and every corridor that led to them, and even the ventilators. Of course I sent an exploratory tendril down there, because we wouldn’t be sisters if I didn’t worry about you and make sure your defences were proof against the most obvious beginner’s mistake I could think of. They were. You were clearly a veteran of the Sister Wars.

I began to wonder again about you and your precious unspeakable say-not-her-name-lest-I-suffer-you-not-to-live swordarm. Had you been bonded from the start? Had you been raised together, groomed by some chattering bone-rattling coterie of ancient nuns for a glorious destiny always foreseen, but never understood? Had there been tomes of precedent and prediction, Harry? Had there been prophecies, auguries, entrails read and bones scattered that concluded _this_ girl and _that_? I rather hoped so. It suited you, and it suited me to imagine, rather more than the drab reality that your previous cavalier had loathed you so much he cut and ran rather than fight and die for you and a crude, base creature who’d clearly adored you had thrown herself on the sword you were offering.

Then, of course, I tore through your primitive and frankly amateurish blood wards like they weren’t there, walked into your chambers like I owned the place, and found nothing in your bed but a note which said, in your least neurotic and most legible tombstone capitals:

**TELL ME HOW YOU GOT HERE.**

You little sod, Nonagesimus. You’d done it all backwards. Inside out. A maze with nothing at its centre, with you off polishing your fibulae or whatever it is you do when you’re not leading me on and pretending you can waste my time.

I eventually found you in an observation dome: a bubble of lattice and transparency on the outside of the Erebos, a tactically redundant concession to the strange habits of necromancers. Your feet were bare, your hands too, and you’d redone your face into what I was mentally classifying as Skeletal Visage Number Three: The Shit-Eating Grin of the Horrible Nun Who’s Crying On The Inside.

You turned your back on the vastness of the void, and you said to me: “Well?”

“As curses and banishments go,” I said, “your wards are the equivalent of flapping your hands and saying _o do shoo, you horrid creature_.”

“Tell me how you broke them. Tomorrow, they will stop you. And they’ll be on your door instead.”

“If you tell me how much it hurt when your fingers grew back.”

Your face doesn’t give much away. Lacking eyebrows, with an inside-out expression painted over the top, and no visible lines or quirks, one is forced to pay very close attention to what you’re looking at and what your lips are doing. I saw them purse, clench, and then you smacked them faintly and said: “I didn’t notice. I was — distracted. By you, actually.”

“You bitch,” I said, and meant it. “My arm’s not worked properly since I stuck it back on and you’re sat there serenely not noticing what a miracle you are? What have you done that I didn’t do? What do you know? Bones and dust are all you’re good for! You’re notorious for it! Give me your damn hand — “ and I reached out and took it and I realised, too late, that I wasn’t wearing gloves either, and that I’d made a terrible mistake.

Augustine had mentioned it, in passing. "Don’t touch me," he’d said when he accepted me into his care, "and in fact don’t touch any of us until you’re sure you’re ready." I had given him some quip about being able to touch myself, and he’d said something like "you’ll have better things to do with your days, but what you do with your nights is your problem," and we’d laughed. And that had been the end of it.

Now I understood why. You’d been a black hole. Now you were a galaxy. I could feel everything about you, as wholly as I could feel myself. I could feel the knot of tension in your back from carrying that obnoxious sword about, the faint throb of incipient migraine in your temples, the deep ache of your muscles from the appalling posture you’d spent all night in as you read up on, then drew all those wards. I could feel all your pain, and the sparks in your brain and the rush of heat and chemicals as you realised you could feel mine too.

I could feel something else, too; a shiver running like quicksilver over your skin and settling between your legs because, I realised, you had barely ever been touched, at all. I had two fingertips on your knuckles — first and second of your right hand — and the rest of my hand laid down across the length of your fingers, and I had you in raptures. And while I was feeling for the break, for any sign of newness, any severance between lumbrical and flexor, you were sitting there with your eyes shut and your mouth slightly open and you sighed for me, so quiet I had to rely on my newfound sense of exactly what your lungs and ribs and muscles were doing to know you were breathing at all.

There was nothing where I’d intended to search, but God, Harry, there was everything everywhere else.

You opened your eyes, set that fierce little mouth back into its line, and said:

“I think I know what you did wrong. Shoulder, please. I need to touch it to be sure.”

I smiled. “Of course you do.”

This time I heard you sigh, saw the ribs you wear outside your own rise and fall in exactly the way your nonexistent bosom didn’t. “Don’t — cheapen this. Please.”

I didn’t. I didn’t even move my fingers from yours. I simply reached up with my dead hand, fumbled my gown off my shoulder as elegantly as I could manage, and took a deep breath as you reached out and touched me, walking your fingers along my collar: trapezoid, conoid, transverse ligaments, exploring and probing. You reached the dead spot at the join itself, at the humerus head: I felt your perception drop off, and I might have whined just a little, unless that was you. You slipped your hand down, under my arm, and felt the soft spot of the thoracic outlet, and this time it was definitely me.

You said: “I thought so. You’ve hung all the moving parts together so well I can’t feel a scar, and you at least put the humerus back in line, but you didn’t hook up the nerves. You’ve been puppeting your own arm all this time. And you’re not even tired. You are brilliant. Lazy, in a special way that means you end up working harder to compensate for how lazy you are, but brilliant.”

Your hand was achingly, exquisitely close to my right breast. I didn’t have the heart to snap at you, at that particular moment. If you moved the wrong way, I’d regret it for at least the rest of the day. Maybe longer.

"Not to lower your opinion of me,” I said, “but I’ve been trying not to use it. I’m left-handed anyway. Babs wasn’t, and unless I’m on the duelling floor, it doesn’t matter. But there, it really, really does.”

“I know how I’d fix it,” you said. “I’ll need to check a few things — Mercymorn will tell me if I set her up right — and it’s going to hurt like hell, but — yes. I can do this.” You pulled your hands away, and broke the circuit, and the darkness fell like your blasted veil between us before I could read how that made you feel. I was back to looking at your face, and trying to guess. “But it’ll cost you.”

“A devil’s bargain with the Ninth Saint. It’s too delicious. What do you want from me?”

You narrowed your eyes. “Why aren’t you scared of me?”

“When we all fall asleep, where do we go?”

That wasn’t me. That was a new voice, and we both jumped. Small mercies. If it had just been me, I’d have had to kill myself.

God was standing at the entrance to the dome. It was a terribly confined space, and we’d huddled up on our knees to both fit in there, and now there was an observer I realised how it must look from the outside. Sadly, there wasn’t enough room to punch the air without decking you too, and I wasn’t about to do that now, was I?

“Sorry,” he said, peering along his nose with something that looked very like kindness, and only a little bit like amiably malicious glee. “Cheap shot. Couldn’t resist. You gave me the setup and everything. I’m glad you two are finally bonding; at least, I assume that’s what this is?”

I didn’t need to be an expert in bare brows and lip quirks to tell that you were mortified. I couldn’t resist turning the knife, Harry, I’m so sorry. I patted the hem of your robe, because I wasn’t going to touch you again where anyone else could see, and I said to him and you and anyone else who might be listening,

“Oh, I was just offering Harrowhark the Ninth her heart’s desire.”

“Is that what they call it these days?” said God, as you scrambled out of the dome and past him at knee height; I don’t think you were even upright until you were halfway down the corridor and accelerating.

The note you left on the outside of my door (underneath the bone ward, which took me a good forty-five minutes to unpick while I was desperate for a bath, thank you very much little sister) contained the only words I got out of you for the rest of the week.

**I’LL HOLD YOU TO THAT.**


	4. ain't gonna need to tell the truth / tell no lies

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Harrow has Some Wine. This turns out to be a Bad Thing.

Time passed, as it does. We were aboard the _Erebos_ for months of slow crawling through deep space, our absent-minded God leaving his youngest children in the hands of his eldest. His eyes seemed focused on some distant point, the horizon of some world we had yet to see, preparing for some battle yet to come.

In that time, I decided I would win. I buried that part of myself that mourned, locked it away somewhere as deep as the Tomb itself, and kept the keys as well hidden as I could. I would never be able to look the Third Saint in the eye, or address him by name. I would always fall quiet when the older siblings talked about their cavaliers, make my excuses and leave if I could. When we passed the Ninth House, in our final slingshot arc out into the void, I shut myself away in my quarters and I cried myself unconscious. 

After that, I made a resolution of my grief. You didn’t know it, Tridentarius, but you had hurt me, you had spurred me, and then you had offered me a way out. I had something over you, and there would come a time when I could ask something you’d never be able to refuse.

How we tormented each other, on that voyage. My wards grew more and more sophisticated, your devious little revenges more and more abstract and refined. I could match you theorem for theorem any day of the week, but you had an edge I’d never possessed; you were a social creature, and you could shape a conversation around me so I never saw the trap I was in until our older siblings burst out laughing in my face.

But it was well and it was good, because I had remade your arm for you. I’d cut your previous attempt away and I’d done what I do best, drawn fresh oss from old, woven tissue out of dust and atoms and dead air, wound your trailing nerves around it and locked them in with the little dots of flesh I was learning, oh-so-slowly, to create. I was watching you all the time, and every time you worked your way around one of my wards instead of dismantling it I’d learned another of your tricks. And I’d been touching you the whole time, feeling every shudder of agony at the work in progress. I might have tugged on a few of your higher nerves a little harder than I needed to, just to watch that pretty skull you keep inside your stupid overdecorated head jerk and twitch.

I wiped the drool off your lips, though. I will never be kind, but I cannot abide mess. That’s why I left the meat to you. You were quite capable of growing your own flesh and wrapping it around my masterpiece, and I took it as a compliment that you didn’t, that you got by with the pad I’d left in your palm and later, much later, the gold leaf you’d apply to your phalanges after Planet Fourteen.

One night I’d find you sitting in the forge, painting the space where your nails should have been, and I’d feel sorry for you again, and this time I wouldn’t have the excuse of system shock and near defeat and unwelcome memories to hide behind. I’d just pity you, and I’d watch you at your craft, and I’d think: _when they’re cooled down, come to me so I can kiss them better._

All that lay in the long future. For now, we drifted on and on. My eighteenth birthday had come and gone in the quiet solitude of space, and not long after that, we were approaching deployment. Our first. God had called us to muster in his cabin and he’d ordered us to dress for an occasion, and I remember how you laughed at how differently we’d all interpreted that instruction.

Augustine always dressed for an occasion. He described himself as a dedicated follower of fashion, and never mind that he was also the one setting the fashion and the only one who cared. I thought he looked ridiculous, with his preening and his posturing and his cigarettes, but I couldn’t deny he’d made an effort.

Mercymorn had surprised me by appearing in a… dress? I didn’t have the vocabulary at the time, and even after all these ages spent enduring your prattle I do not and will not care to acquire it. She was never feminine, until she was, and it’s only a pity she still looked like she was going to stab us both before the nuts were served.

The Third was present. I do not, and will not, consider what the Third is doing unless I have to: unless it is a matter of life and death.

You, of course, were exquisite. You had blossomed into your unloveliness and found ways to make that flat sheet of hair stand up and coil, shades that set off that desaturated skin. Your eyes had never settled, but you’d learned to work around that, to bring all your hues together in a harmony. You were colourless by nature, but you’d learned to decorate.

And I, according to you, was resplendent. I wasn’t to know. I had spent some time in the library; I had even asked some of the Cohort officers, hesitantly picking my way around their diffidence to explain that I had never attended a military function, never in fact held a military rank, and I was aware that the Ninth House had some prescribed aesthetics and could I prevail on the quartermaster?

They had found me a musty dress uniform; crushed velvet, pressed and forgotten for two generations. Antiquated, threadbare, held together by wishful thinking and hopeless optimism. It was black, mercifully, but the ancient brocade and the delicate threads were gold. It had a cape, which I threw back over my right shoulder, not so I could draw my rapier but so I had room for the hilt of my two-hander, which I was going to wear no matter what. I slipped powder into the belt, on the left hand side; here, at least, I was finally going to get my wish. I had worn the Smiling Skull — the most occasional face I had.

“Good God,” you said when you saw me. “Just tell me one thing. May I at least ravish you over dessert, before they return you to the museum?”

God had worn a tie. That was essentially it. The usual soft, worn-out look of him had gained a touch of formality. There might have been cufflinks. He might have changed his shoes. He was not happy about the sword, but he let it slide.

I barely ate, and I drank too much. You knew, and because you knew you pitied me; the Ninth was a puritan House, and besides my inexperience I am very small. Two drinks for you is too many for me, and we had many, many more than two drinks. God seemed unable to go five minutes without a toast, without a rambling explanation of something the others had all heard before. He toasted them, he toasted the Cohort, he toasted their absent friends, each fallen lyctor and lost cavalier by name, and he even toasted us.

“My last, lost children. The only two who made it. I don’t even know what to call you. I — Augustine, Mercymorn, help me out here.”

Augustine rose with careful unfolding grace, a paper sculpture of a man who’d tear his folds and seams if he moved too fast, and he looked at you and said: “Vindication. After all that fuss, after everything you did wrong, after everything Cyth fouled up, this one figured it out and saw it through and never looked back. The Saint of the Emperor’s Vindication, and I hope you bloody well choke on it. Saving your presence, of course.”

God sighed, and it sounded like the end of the world. “I’m glad you and Mercy are talking again, but if she could keep her words out of your mouth, I'd be even gladder. The Saint of Vindication, then.”

You drank. You smiled. I touched the glass to my lips, but I couldn’t make them open. I was still waiting.

Mercymorn, unlovely Mercymorn, my spur, my bludgeon, the whip at my back and the stone under my feet. I had badly misjudged her. She didn’t even look at me; she turned to God, and she said: “This one’s given you her whole life, John. You never asked for it, you never knew you had it, and before she even learned who she was she was yours. And fuck me, it’s like that all the way down, if what you said she asked of you is true. The Saint of Devotion. How could she be anything else?”

I drained my glass in one and let it fall. I couldn’t meet his gaze — my God, my Teacher, my Master. I certainly couldn’t meet hers. She’d read me down to the bone and I’d told her nothing, given her no reason, no idea. And yet — she was wrong. Beyond the bone, deeper than any mystery of oss and gristle, there was my final heresy, the truth unspoken. I served the Emperor, but I was never his, I belonged and always would to — 

I became aware that I was sobbing. That some very real words were choking their way out of me. That it was not safe, not here. That I was in very clear and present danger of confessing everything.

And then you kissed me.

You kissed me in full view of God and all his surviving saints. You leaned across the table, you grabbed me by the cord that held my cape across my chest, and you — you tasted of white wine and oysters, of all the seasonings and delicacies I’d been unable to stomach all night, of your own hot blood and hammering heart, of meat and dentine, and I was too shocked and scared and sad to resist you pushing the kiss further, pulling me half onto the table. I had never been wanted, never been pursued, never been desired, and now I had your tongue in my mouth as if it belonged there, and we were alive.

It was such utter and absolute blasphemy, and I thought I could hear the righteous bastards applauding as you dragged me out of there.

In the corridor outside God’s suite, you offered me the curse of you again; backed me into an alcove and pinned me to the wall, against the flat of my sword, and you waited, your lips hovering a breath away from mine.

“What,” I said, and took that breath at last, “did you just do?”

“Made our excuses for us, and left,” you said. “You poor thing. You’d sit there writhing and falling out of your seat and crying under the table all night because you think that’s normal, and — for fuck’s sake, when someone says they want to have you atop the croquembouche, you have another option. You have always had another option. I have been right here, waiting for you to wake up and realise it, ever since — ”

“Since the dome,” I breathed.

“Before,” you said. “Ever since we came on board. I know you can’t see past your own broken heart, I know you probably scourge yourself with a handful of bones every time you dare to want something, but — God, I’m drunk.”

“Please don’t say God again. I don’t think I could stand it. Just — explain. I have absolutely no frame of reference here.”

“It’s really very simple,” you said. Your tongue parted your lips as you shifted down, let me move a little and watched me up close. “Our lives are different from anybody else’s. Nobody in the universe is doing what we’re doing. The only people who’ve done it are those three old bastards who are using us, somehow, to get back at — at him. We are, otherwise, absolutely alone. There is nobody else who understands what I’m feeling but you. There is nobody else who can understand what you’re feeling but me. I don’t love you. Half the time I don’t even like you. But I want you. You’re the only thing I can possibly want and that makes me want you all the more.”

“You don’t know what I am,” I whispered back. “You want something that isn’t yours, and I can’t even tell you why.”

“You will,” you said. “You’ll tell me everything. Because you’ll have no-one else to tell, and not telling will drive you mad.” You let me go, then; stepped back, swayed only a very little bit, and you didn’t smile at all. “But I’ll wait.”

We would come to it, in time. Planet Fourteen awaited us. And I didn’t know it then, but Planet Fourteen had something that would let me confess.

Planet Fourteen had oceans.


	5. through eternal night

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Harrow tries to have a moment. Ianthe surprises herself by allowing it.

We didn’t see each other for a while, after that.

Oh, we went to Planet One together, and I know you were on some of the others, but there’s a difference between being in the same warzone and _being_ the same warzone, don’t you think?

I started to hear about you after the taking of Planet Five. The Cohort had gone from being nervous around their first black chaplain in two generations to awestruck. I started hearing that the Saint of Devotion could turn a whole battlefield in a moment, without ever drawing her sword; that seas of bone would strip themselves of flesh and rise when she gave the word. On Planet Five, they told me, you’d issued an entire platoon with a single broken tooth apiece and as they made for their bridgehead, _bamf_ — every swordsman had a shield of regenerating oss as tall as they were.

They told me that the major in charge hadn’t believed in you, had gainsaid you when you told him you could save his siblings of the sword. They told me he fell to his knees and begged you for penitence. They told me, word-for-word, your answer, because — as I’d later learn from the holos and despatches — you were saying it a lot. You said it to every officer who doubted you, every enemy who surrendered, every serving body who asked how they could be closer to you.

_Go to the Ninth House. Swear your fealty to the Tomb. Honour the fortunate dead._

Harrowhark Nonagesimus, you cheeky minx, you were starting a cult. Or maybe you’d become the centre of one without quite realising. Everything you say has always been so gloomily overwrought — it’s easy to perceive divine inspiration in, well, you being you. But when I started to see military friars in the drab robes and skull paint of the Ninth House joining my own detachments, I realised you’d done what you set out to do. It was always for the House, for the Tomb, wasn’t it? You never wanted this for yourself; you took it as read that you would be the greatest necromancer of your generation, and the question was always _how may this self-evident fact benefit the Ninth?_

I didn’t understand why until Planet Fourteen.

I wasn’t jealous, by the way. I had a reputation of my own. The Cohort worshipped you, but they adored me. You were a silent force; I was a figurehead. You built a cult; I built a legend. I liberated Planet Eight largely by walking into a room and emasculating every member of the ruling council through, well. Me being me. Four fifths of the insurrection laid down arms when I told them and would have quite happily let me walk over their backs on my way to handling the rest. You had shrines; I had statues. You had devotion; I had vindication. Our teachers had nailed that. And nobody had a poster of _you_ on their bedroom wall.

We’d killed Planet One together, driven our swords down and descended to finish the job, turned the soul of a world into a lambent thanergetic beacon for the galaxy to look on and despair. Under the Third’s guidance, because God didn’t think either of us should have to do that alone the first time, and I don’t blame him in the slightest after I found out how it felt.

After that we politely agreed we’d give them numbers. Easier than counting the names they’d been given — the sentimental trappings of people who loved the worlds they lived on. The death of a planet shouldn’t be personal.

I think Planet Fourteen had been Gethsemane. A real hotbed of insurrection, that one; we hadn’t met the Edenites head on before, and it was the first time I’d been genuinely injured in the field. After we took prisoners I’d found out some things I didn’t feel better for knowing, and after those revelations, meeting you again felt too much like an afterthought. At least, until I actually saw you.

We met on a beach, at night. There was one journey left to make, an isolated subcontinent that needed sweeping, and after I’d been stabbed through a perfectly serviceable kidney I was in the mood to do the job personally, even before I knew I had to. There weren’t many troops prepared to cross the sea with me, though — except the kind of fanatics attracted to you.

You’ve never been one for social niceties, and eighteen years of sainthood hadn’t done you any favours. You’re the only person I know, besides the Third, who’ll respond to a greeting with a cryptic “Doesn’t it smell like Canaan to you?”

I told you it smelled like victory, and you made a little sound that might have been a chuckle or a scoff. Or both.

“You’d know. I’ve been following your progress. Difficult not to, since the casters apparently love you.”

“Don’t do yourself down, Harry. I can’t sleep in that camp for the sound of knucklebones, and I hold you personally responsible for spreading that filthy habit.”

“That sacred tradition,” you said, and sighed, barely audible above the hiss and spin of the waves. “I wish you would try to take things seriously. I wish I could trust you with,” and as your breath caught, you took another louder breath and I saw us back on the _Erebos_ again and realised what this was about, “anything. You were right, you know. About us being the only ones who could share this burden. I thought one day we might be together again, and I’d say _there are things I’d like to tell you_ and you’d listen, but I still can’t trust you not to stick your barbed tongue where it doesn’t belong and ruin everything.”

I sat down beside you. We were on a thin spur of sandstone, a little harder than the bay that spread to either side, and some way from the landing craft and the rows of Cohort tents and the lights. For a while, I didn’t say anything. I looked out at the dark water and wondered, of all things, how much it weighed. How much of this world was amassed in that quietly roiling gorgeousness. I was trying not to say anything about me sticking my tongue anywhere and ruining anyone, and any random thought would do to distract me from the obvious.

“There are,” I said, without meeting your gaze, “one or two things I would also like to confess. Things that are probably matters of Imperial security, and I would hope I could trust my sister lyctor with them, perhaps even… more than I could trust my God. So. I’ll make a deal with you. I’ll tell you my secrets if you tell me yours, and I even promise to take yours as gospel if you’ll keep mine apocryphal. Does that do anything for you?”

You stood up. It was strangely graceful, as if you’d rehearsed the movement, as if you’d known it was going to happen. You reached down for my hand and I took it, and you gave me just enough time to rise before you walked down the spit of stone, into the sea. I wore a pale white cape over my fatigues, and they were all heavy as sins in seconds; your robes spread out around you, drifting and reaching for smaller creatures in the deep.

“It’s a tradition,” you said, when you were up to your waist and I to my hips. “I learned this secret in salt water. I’ve only told one other person in my life, and she’s — past caring, now — but I want to _keep_ the tradition.”

I nodded. If I’d said anything, I’d have dessicated and snapped my fresh promise in two: besides, I was intrigued. Of course you’d have some ritual of secrecy in which words and water transubstantiated into trust. You have to complicate everything.

And so you told me. You told me why the Ninth House had borne two children in the span of twenty years, and you told me who had ordered it, and why they’d done it, and why they chose annihilation over vindication when they couldn’t stand to see your keen little face achieving all they’d ever wanted from the doing of it. And you told me that only one other baby Niner had survived, the changeling child, the oblation who fell out of the sky with nothing but an angry ghost to guide her, and how it had destroyed you to consume her too, in the end.

And I said to you that it explained everything, but it changed nothing. That all those sacrifices, all those sins, had been worth it, because they had produced you. That you were my little sister, my fellow saint, and that we were on this long hard road together no matter how dark the hell it led out of, and I would walk it with you because the alternative was to walk alone.

You pulled me down into the water, and your kiss was ghost-fire on the waves. Electric, luminous, flooding through my nerves and burning colder than the sea. You weren’t accomplished, but you were committed. You yearned. In that moment, I was content to let you.

“Don’t misunderstand this,” you said, when we came up for air. “My affections lie buried in the Locked Tomb. I cannot — “

“I will always have to share you with your faith, and with your grief,” I told you. “I can live with that. Can you? Can you bring yourself to give me what you have left?”

You smiled, a little; it was difficult to see in the dark, but easy to perceive. You still had your hands on me, and I could feel nerves fire, muscles shift, lips spread.

“I can but try,” you said.

We kissed again, and I walked us back a little, toward the water’s edge, but something stopped me. Some echo of your Ninth House melodramatics kept me there. If you felt safe enough to talk to me when you were here, you probably wouldn’t feel safe enough to listen if you weren’t.

And so, instead of lying down among the waves and taking you right there and then, I told you my truth — that Coronabeth was never the adept of the family, which you knew, and that we’d seen the lacuna, the elegant omission in the Emperor’s invitation and his challenge. We’d seen that the cavaliers might well not be coming home, and so we’d taken Naberius (I used his full name, because you wanted it that way — ‘Babs’ is not a name for the confessional) instead. The heir and the spare. Just in case. We had suspected, all along.

I should have had Coronabeth. I should have been carrying my sister’s ghost inside me, just like I’d always carried her when we were alive. But — and the words choked on my lips as I realised they were true — when the moment came I couldn’t do it, I could never have done it in a million years. I spared my sister and it was the best thing I had ever done even if it meant my sainthood was founded on a lie.

And then I told you about some other lies I’d uncovered. I told you that Coronabeth and Camilla the Sixth were still alive — here, on what would shortly become Planet Fourteen — and that I’d stayed to deliver the final blow because I wanted to see them once more. I wanted to find out why my sister had betrayed me, and gone over to the Blood of Eden.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As much as part of me wanted to go full skeleton war, I've realised (with only one chapter left to actually write) that this ain't the fic that does that. I'm sorry if you were all hoping for the lesbian goth equivalent of Black Library bolter porn. There was a time when I could do that, but I've just written off one multi-chapter fic that expanded to unmanageable lengths and I'd like to keep this one under control so it actually gets finished.


	6. guess it's time for the judgment day

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Harrow checks in with Camilla. Ianthe catches up with Coronabeth. It's not a good time for anyone.
> 
> POV goes all to hell in this chapter. Felt like the best way to do it.

We met again at the tail end of summer, on Gethsemane; on a planet you’d already killed. You were carrion; bare bone and black feathers, picking at the carcass in its final throes, while it was still warm.

I waited for you in a safehouse that hadn’t been safe in weeks, a white room with a dusty table and a couple of chairs and a few effects of a family who’d lived here, once. A simple life. No gods, no masters, no ancient necromantic horrors with smiling eyes. I’d known their names. I’d liked them. They had fled, and now I was stuck here with you.

Two streets away, I knew, Coronabeth and her sister were together in the olive grove. At least they got to do this outdoors.

You took a seat straight away when you arrived. You tapped your wrist, and said the Cohort were an hour behind you, and if I valued my life I’d make this quick and get out before they arrived.

I’ve always respected you for that. You cloak yourself in nonsense but once you’ve decided to work with someone, you don’t fuck them around.

“I can’t tell you everything,” I said. “None of us knows the entire plan. Only way we could keep the secret was if nobody knew exactly what it was. All you have to do is hear us out, and see it through when it starts to happen.”

“You are asking me to stand by while you attack and dethrone God.”

“I am asking you to understand why we have to. We’ve all heard something that convinced us. We all took persuading, and we’re all in this for our own reasons. It’s heterodoxy. Freedom, of a sort.”

“Make your case.”

In a pocket — top right, if it matters — I was carrying a personal recorder. I fetched it out, set it down carefully, and slid it into the middle of the table. “I need you to listen to this,” I said, and I turned it on.

I could tell you recognised the voice on the recording, straight away. Your head snapped down to the speaker, and you stared like it had sprung up and started a striptease.

I didn’t know who was speaking. A woman. Young side of elderly, middle aged maybe. Tired. Drained. The most done-with-this-shit voice I’d ever heard.

_“God lied to us. None of them had to die. None of our cavaliers had to lay down their lives for us to become — this. He killed the only one of us who found him out, before she could finish the job and become — like him. Every lyctor since has walked down the same road of good intentions and he’s done nothing to dissuade them. And ever since I found out I’ve been working out how to kill him.”_

“You realise,” you said, “you’ve just identified the traitor to me.”

“You’re ahead of me, then, because I’ve no idea who she is.” I shrugged. “I know she’s not the only one. I don’t know who else is in on it. I don’t know what Coronabeth knows, or what she’s telling Ianthe, just that it’s not this and you can’t share this with them. Someone out there held all the cards, but they’ve dealt them out by now. And there’s more. A trump you might want to keep hold of, when we flip the table.”

You waited, with the patience of the grave, and I held my breath for a moment before I let it go to tell you. It might have been the last breath I ever took, if you didn’t like what you heard. I’d go down fighting, I told myself. You’d lose a limb. An eyeball. Bladder control. Something.

“For… reasons I’m not aware of, and thus cannot divulge,” I told you, “we have to return Gideon Nav’s body to Drearburh. She’ll be waiting for you when this is done.”

You looked at me, through those stolen eyes, the golden coins in your dead and empty sockets, the toll you’d paid the ferryman without ever choosing. I’ve never seen someone so still; the bones at your wrists and ankles clicked and clattered, but you were absolutely dead on your feet.

“As is only fitting,” you said. “She was a daughter of the Ninth, by adoption and indenture and cavalier’s vow. I assume she isn’t here. You wouldn’t be that stupid.”

“I am a cousin of the Sixth,” I said. I felt very conscious of my own teeth, right then; I could easily imagine all the vile things you could do without even touching me, and wondered if I could get even one good shot in before I found my own bottom row had betrayed me and shot into my brain or something. Something gross and dramatic.

You nodded. I decided this was as close as we were likely to get. I didn’t turn my back on you, for much the same reason you don’t take your eyes off a live grenade in the air, and I walked backwards into the street like you were some kind of awful queen.

I was barely two metres from the door when the bones started to fly. When you tore everything in that room to ribbons. When you screamed, so loud and so long I thought you’d bring up both your lungs before you stopped.

You walked out without a shred of bone on you: just a slip of a girl in black fatigues and a cloak that didn’t fit her any more and a sword she couldn’t lift.

“I have decided to trust you, Camilla the Sixth,” you whispered. I didn’t expect you to speak at all. “In hope of an honest world.”

* * *

We used to rule the world. Even before it was passed into our hands, before we were confirmed in our power, everything in our eyesight was ours. There was never any question that we would share everything: that we would twist and turn however, tell the world at our feet and the Houses at our throats everything they wished to believe. We would always know the truth of it; that we were one flesh, to one end, from the moment we began and as long as we existed.

We are the Emperor’s Voice. We tell whatever lies serve Him.

That was the nature of the game, from the start, and we lied to all the others at Canaan. I posed and preened and pressed on every nerve I could, and you worked away in the dark and dust, figuring things out, learning, knowing, growing. Every night we sat up and you told me just enough to keep the others fooled; to me, you admitted you didn’t know, not yet, but you were close, you were sure.

I don’t know when you started to lie to me, sister. I don’t know when you knew why I wouldn’t be going home. I only knew that on the last day you came to us, and you demanded Naberius’ sword, and you didn’t even glance at me before you ran him through.

You made a liar of me, too. One flesh, one end. I meant it. You were always the better of us, and I would gladly have died to perfect you. I would have lived on in your memory, in your every word and deed. I would have been your shadow, your echo, your gaze. One soul, in one body, at last.

And now I have to sit here, under a fading sun, and behold your perfection from without, and I wonder: how could my sister hurt me so?

You are a vision, even mutilated as you are. I have aged, and age has wearied me; you’ve barely changed at all. The dust doesn’t seem to stick to you, as it does to me, and the dry air doesn’t make you rasp at all.

You ask me how I could do this to you, and I ask you what choice I had. I was bereft of purpose, ruined and cast aside; what does it matter if I fall down among the dregs, now? What matter God and all His angels?

You ask if it’s personal and puerile, and I ask if you think so little of me. I ask if you can bear the thought that I shall die one day, without you. I ask if you have really, truly understood what forever means.

You tell me you have, but — Ianthe, I am you, and you are me, and we’ve lied together so many times, and I can always tell. I tell you it’s not too late. What’s done can be undone. You can walk back from this. There’s a way to bring all God’s children home safe, down the River to the Sea, and we can go down together, and all you have to do is let it happen.

You ask why you would want to come back. You ask me to come with you, instead; that you can save me from this mortality, that you can always save me.

I tell you I’m not the one who needs saving. I tell you the truth. I tell you what’s waiting at the end of your journey: that God betrays everyone He elevates in the end, and now I know that, I can’t leave you to His mercy. I love you more than God Himself, and if killing Him saves you, that’s no choice at all.

* * *

_The Saint of Vindication and the Saint of Devotion await the Saint of Duty, in the carcass of Gethsemane. Their report has been brief, and to the point. The planet is claimed, and pacified; some elements of the Blood of Eden’s command structure have escaped their scrutiny, but the reckoning will come, another time._

_They don’t ask each other what they know. Ianthe doesn’t ask Harrowhark what happened to her armour, and Harrowhark doesn’t mention the trail of tears on her sister’s face. Their fingers lock together, and they watch the shuttle descend from flaming star to thundercrack to simple thing hulled in ceramic and cremains._

_They will not be pursuing the Blood of Eden. The moment long feared and long awaited has come. The Beasts are coming, and they are bound for the Mithraeum, and the bitter end._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one was a challenge. I simply don't grok Coronabeth well enough to write her dialogue, so I hope the monologue is up to snuff.
> 
> I'm kinda skirting around the details of the plan here, but it's more or less as I'm speculating it was MEANT to go in the books: one end of the conspiracy intends to open the Tomb and kick the foundations out from under the Necrolord, while his lyctors sabotage their last stand and catch him coming and going. They're deliberately not telling everyone everything because everybody involved has some reason to let this thing fall apart.


	7. tear it up and start again

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> We skip to the end.

The Tomb is open.  
The Beasts have ridden forth.  
God is dead, and all his lies are made apparent.

I have nothing left but you – and you, I know, have always wanted to destroy me.

Mission accomplished, Tridentarius.

We have come back to Drearburh. I have done my utmost to languish in your arms, to let you savour your victory. It is no more than you deserve, and while this is not true love, never has been, it means something nonetheless. In the slow sub-light crawl to my cold hard world I have given you what you want, refused you nothing, come freely to your bed at night as _Erebos_ carries me home.

Never to return. Never to return.

You will see. This fatal procession through the void is my funeral, your trial. You have destroyed me, but you will never keep me. You cannot have what your victory has unmade.

You see, I learned from you, my dear Ianthe. My comrade, my sister, my lover. I fell for you, but I learned from you at last. I am patient, and I have won, in the end.

You have seen me in strength and weakness, loss and pain, hope and fear. You have seen me naked and ashamed, and you have seen me show my painted smile to a dozen skies and proclaim a vow you have never fully accepted.

Never to forget. Never to forget.

Smother me with your affections if you wish. Coil yourself around my body. These days are our last, and you do not know it. We may as well enjoy them. I have never fallen for you as utterly as you wish, but I have wanted you, trusted you, and on this final voyage I may even have come to like you, now I know you stand for something. But this is as close as I dare come. I killed Gideon the First, but you watched Mercymorn die, let Augustine destroy himself and the Mithraeum in a day, and stood by as our mad God fell into the abyss that waited for him — as you have always waited for me.

You are oblivion.

That final blessing is not yours to bestow, and never has been. So I have kept one secret covenant, and now – now that we cross the cathedral floor, descend to the emptied Tomb, your exultant hand pushing aside the remains of wards that mean nothing and will come to mean less than nothing as our lord and master's poison leeches out of the universe – now that we cross the waveless water and stand where I stood as a child, spake as a child, fell and hoped and prayed as a child – now you are witness.

Because we did not come here alone. My retainers have been working. The Ninth House, of which I am the last heir and always have been, have prepared my Tomb to receive us. They have taken what was promised by the Blood of Eden, the wages of sin, the heretic's final reward. They hold something precious beyond imagining, locked in a stasis-coffin that functions for now, pure technology, almost untouched by its maker's theorems. In case of emergency: break glass.

The look on your face, Ianthe. My poor faithless one. I finally know, I think, what it feels like to be you. Just this once.

"Her. I might have known. You sentimental little – "

"Shut up," I snap. And here, my voice carries. It resounds. This deep dark place was made for me, and I for it, and I have always known how to work these rooms alone among all rooms. Here, at last, I can do what you have always done so easily. "I call in my debt. My heart’s desire. I will not invoke the Tomb," and I see you mouth _good, because,_ but this is no longer your victory and I will not let you take it from me now, "but I will expect you to make good on your promise. It was a lifetime ago. A lifetime you would not have fully lived without me."

You raise the hand I made for you, as if to strike or to caress, and you settle at last with it over your heart in a salute. Aching and reluctant.

"What would you have me do, Reverend Daughter? I'm afraid I don't have a pair of ridiculous sunglasses, or a sword as long as you are tall, and I would look terrible as a redhead, but I am what you have to serve you."

You spit the words. You twist on the lance of my contempt even as it pierces you. So petty. You always have been petty.

"Seal us in. Deactivate the field. Then lock the Tomb again, roll back the stone. Give back what was taken from the Ninth. Give them a secret to protect. Give them an article of faith."

Your breath escapes you, hanging in the clammy air. You know the words I haven't deigned to speak; you can hear the silent request I'm making of you. "Harry. You absolute romantic. You shouldn't have."

"I thought you'd enjoy it. After all," I say, with a real smile on my face, "you were the end of her," I say, as I step inside your guard and kiss you as softly as I dare, as gently as I can manage after all these years upon years of what we have, what we’ve been to one another, and what I'm asking of you now, "and you have always wanted to end me too. My love, my enemy — you win."

You do not smile. You do not weep. You are a brutal credit to yourself, to the last. But in your lips, I feel your core shaking, and in your hands I feel your last goodbye.

"Do this now in remembrance of me," I whisper. "Eight worlds I leave to thee. Do what thou wilt with them, but let me rest at last."

Your arms, my hearse, release me. My Tomb awaits. I unbuckle my sword, my absurd and foolish sword, the souls of a dozen planets on its empty conscience, and I lay it in the hand from which it was taken and to which it now returns. Everything is right. Everything is ritual. My every movement is a new tradition, and I rejoice.

I rise, from the ashes I have always worn, and climb inside. I nestle into the crook of her long and perfect arm, lay my head on her shoulder, and I wait for the grave to take her back and let this burden pass from me. In time, with the field at bay, she and I will decay together, until only bones remain, commingled in the dark, united in true death.

One flesh, one end, at last.

You cannot resist. You cannot refuse. This final betrayal is perfect, and you know it to be so. Somewhere in what passes for your soul, even you know this is something holy. You told me so yourself, after all. And you’re the one who seduced me with predeterminism, so really — what right have you to complain now?

I can feel the tip of your blade — the trident knife you took from poor dead Naberius, like everything else — at the base of my skull, against the occipital crest. Mercymorn was very clear. Limbs don’t grow back. Decapitation will do the trick. Nerves are the key to the mystery. Remove the head; destroy the brain. That’s how you kill a baby god.

With my last breath I thank you, from the deepest depth of me. You have earned that much, Ianthe, and I know you’ll miss me, but it changes nothing.

I gave you a lifetime. Now I give her eternity.

By the time I know you’ve killed me, I’m already dead.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wrote this final chapter first, and I was originally tempted to tell the story backwards or something similarly pretentious, but I thought better of it. I now feel I've turned over too many pages at once, skipped a lot of things it would have been nice to see, but longfic and I have a storied relationship, and I'd rather finish half a job than overreach myself and leave another unfinished project in my dust.
> 
> These have been seven glimpses into something bigger, and I hope you've enjoyed them for what they are.


End file.
